The perception was that Deadly Brew was essentially a mandatory PvP talent, which runs against our overall goal of creating choices, while at the same time being highly situational in endgame PvE.

When the new build hits the servers, take a look at the new set bonuses on the Mists PvP sets. We've added new bonuses alongside the existing ones in most cases, and for Rogues, that's where Deadly Brew has gone.

Oh okay that makes sense, but that still begs the question why remove that from PvE rogues? That entire tier has literally no options for me. The talent it self is extremely situational, however I can see its uses on boss adds that need to be burned.

If you don't want to make mandatory talents why is prep still an option?

Edit: Thank you for replaying and clarifying this for us (: Any word on how sap, blind, and gouge benefit from this talent?

A couple of points here: First off, regarding the functionality of Prey on the Weak, the primary benefit is going to come on Cheap Shot and Kidney Shot. Blind, Sap, and Gouge are included as a minor ancillary benefit -- there may be situations where you use an Incapacitate to pool energy and prepare a burst, and a bit of increased damage on your opening attack (or a teammate's Chaos Bolt...) would be helpful.

Second, regarding the usefulness of the tier as a whole in PvE, what you really are questioning is its usefulness in raiding. Any of the talents in that row are going to be quite impactful in scenarios, dungeons (and if you scoff at the idea of using any sort of crowd control in dungeons, check out our Challenge Modes), outdoor solo gameplay, etc. So let's be clear about that. But the criticism regarding raiding is a fair one.

The majority of our raid bosses do not involve enemies that can be stunned or incapacitated, and I'm not going to try to argue to the contrary. And ideally, a talent tier like the Rogue level 75 would be universally appealing, and present compelling choices, to all types of players who do all types of content. Here are three possible approaches to solving that problem:

Add a clearly raid-useful talent to the tier in place of Deadly Brew; something that increases your DPS, or gives you more movement or survivability. The problem? Every raiding rogue will take that talent, and ignore the other two.

Redesign the whole tier, moving away from a control theme entirely. The problem here is that we'd essentially be abandoning the design space of ever having talents that improve or rely upon crowd control effects.

Attempt to incorporate more opportunities for crowd-control effects and short-duration effects like Stuns and Incapacitates to shine in our raid encounters. In general, the most interesting raid encounters are the ones that involve movement, control, coordination, and aren't just a matter of making your DPS number as big as possible. We're not there yet, but I think we'd like to be.